Mass Terror Against Blacks in America — What Was It Like?: Reprints of Newspaper Articles From the Time

Will Brown (left) after being killed, mutilated and burned outside a courthouse in Omaha on September 28, 1919. Laura Nelson (right) was lynched on May 25, 1911 in Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. Ms. Nelson was lynched along with her
son. They were hung together from a local bridge. Among the killers of Ms. Nelson and her son was Charley Guthrie,
the father of famed folk singer Woody Guthrie. This photograph of her lynching was sold on postcards.

By Ronald David Jackson
A new study shows that almost 4000 African Americans were lynched during a 73 year period in America's South ending in 1950. Clearly, this is an undercount of racial killings since outright murders of blacks by whites (the kind that didn't involve hanging) are not included in this study. You can watch an interview with Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative which conducted the study, here.

Public torture, lynching, and burnings was a gruesome social celebration
for many whites and photographs from lynchings were often published as postcards and sold in stores across the United States. Racists looked for any reason to lynch blacks, often killing them for "infractions" as minor as bumping into whites while
rushing for a train, daring to wear a military uniform, or for not addressing whites as "Mr." or "Mrs." One black woman was even lynched for knocking on the front door of a
white-owned home when social protocol demanded African Americans should only approach
the back door. Hundreds of Mexican Americans were also
lynched, often for things as minor as speaking Spanish.

Newspaper Publications and Lynchings
What follows are newspaper items from an era when blacks faced mass terror throughout America. These items were captured more or less at random from a newspaper database maintained by the Library of Congress. Some of the articles were published in black-owned publications.

The first thing I noticed about many of these articles is that lynchings of blacks was so commonplace that in most cases the article didn't even warrant a big headline and more than just a few sentences. Therefore, some readers might even find it difficult to find the item on the page. I deliberately did not highlight the articles on any of the pages so that readers will get some sense of how un-important lynchings were to most whites at the time.

You will notice that blacks were being lynched for such "major" offenses as the alleged killing a cow or a horse. Many of the articles were written in a cheerful style, as lynchings were often festive occasions for the whites in attendance; and many articles were written in a dry "matter of fact" style, as if lynchings were an ordinary everyday occurrence. In many cases, the lynchings were of blacks who "didn't know their place." For example, blacks were being lynched simply because they were successful businesspersons, or had the audacity to hit back when struck by a white person.

The reason given for many of the lynchings was "assault" (rape) or "attempted assault" of a white woman. Common sense suggests that in the vast majority of cases this was merely a convenient excuse that helped to "justify" the murder in the minds of the white public. In those days black men could be lynched for merely looking at a white woman. So to suggest that thousands of black men were running around the country assaulting white women is simply absurd, especially given the fact that the "black rapist" could have "safely" raped a black woman in a black community and gotten away with it — since white society at the time had so little concern for the well-being of black women or the goings on within the black community.

Of particular note is the fact that many lynchings took place outside of the so-called "Deep South", which blows away the myth that lynchings were a Southern phenomenon only. The new study on lynchings calculates that almost 4,000 blacks were lynched. This may be a extremely conservative estimate, because a search of the Library of Congress' newspaper database using the search terms "Negro" and "lynched" returned 33,745 items. We can assume, however, that in some cases several different newspapers may have reported on the same incident.

The Shame of AmericaThe Evening Star, November 23, 1922

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Damnable White WhelpsCayton's Weekly, June 08, 1918

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The Appeal on Racism and LynchingDecember 02, 1922

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Race War ProbableThe Day Book. (Chicago, Ill.), September 11, 1912

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Deluth - The Lynching of Three NegroesCayton's Weekly, August 28, 1920

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Lynching Every 48 Hours After Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill Death

The Appeal, December 30, 1922

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A Southern Pastime - Lynching The Colored American, February 03, 1900

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The Wets' Side Of It - Blacks Running From South to Escape LynchingThe Day Book, February 09, 1917